Friday 23 March 2001 20.10 EST
First published on Friday 23 March 2001 20.10 EST

A doctor's walk to the pub becomes a long, heroic trek through torrential rain. A man stares for ages at cable cars in his mining town. A vengeful mob looks to cause apocalyptic trouble under the baleful promptings of a dead whale. These are images from the world of Hungarian director Bela Tarr, whose contemplative pacing and long, composed takes have provoked comparisons to the dream spiritualism of Andrei Tarkovsky, or the slowly unravelling tableaux of Hungary's almost forgotten master Miklos Jancso.

But Tarr's imaginative universe is entirely his own - even if he took a long, unlikely path to arrive at it. His watchword seems to be patience - his latest film, Werckmeister Harmonies, took four years (and seven cinematographers) to make. He demands patience from audiences, too - his notorious magnum opus, Satantango, lasts seven and a quarter hours.

For a long time, Tarr was only a rumour for British cinephiles - his work had rarely been seen here, although you occasionally met a French or American pundit who had emerged wild-eyed from Satantango to speak of endurance-length takes and non-stop rain. Tarr was particularly praised by Susan Sontag, who numbered his films among those "heroic violations of the norms" on which cinema's future may depend.

So Tarr, the subject of a current NFT retrospective, arrived in this country cloaked in mystique. But he dismisses any scent of enigma around his work. "When we are making a movie," he says, "we only talk about concrete situations - where the camera is, what will be the first and the last shot. We never talk about art or God."

"We" is Tarr and his partner of more than 20 years, Agnes Hranitzky, who has edited all his films. They cut a dash together, in bohemian black with matching scarves. Hranitzky, who doesn't speak English, occasionally mutters a prompt to Tarr. I ask how on earth she manages to edit a film like Satantango, with its succession of extended takes. "The important thing," she says via Tarr, "is to know where not to cut."

Tarr and Hranitzky didn't always make films as enigmatic as Satantango. Their early work was hard social realism - working-class vignettes in tight, claustrophobic framings. Tarr never considered himself a political film-maker, he says. "But I hope we have some social sensibility - and of course, we are always with poor people and ugly people."

Tarr made his first short film at 16, and directed his first feature, Family Nest, in 1979 - an uncomfortable miniature about a young woman forced to live with her boorish in-laws due to Hungary's extreme housing shortage. The Outsider (1981) was about a young bohemian and his variously boozy and druggy friends. That film, Tarr says, was as much a reaction against the Hungarian cinema of the time as it was against the political system. "There were a lot of shit things in the cinema, a lot of lies. We weren't knocking at the door, we just beat it down. We were coming with some fresh, new, true, real things. We just wanted to show the reality - anti-movies."

Tarr and Hranitzky were criticised for making films about characters marginal to the social mainstream. "We said, for us rich people are marginal." They stood their ground against what Tarr calls Hungary's "soft" censorship system, but when they ran a studio in the early 1980s with other experimental film-makers, the government closed it down. The official film bodies told them they had no future working in Hungary, and the pair briefly went into a sort of exile in Berlin.

After the communist system collapsed, Tarr and Hranitzky were invited home, and at last were able to make Satantango, their long-planned adaptation of a novel by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. By this time, their films had changed radically: everything seemed to take place in a crumbling, depressive world of mud, alcohol and betrayal. The landscapes had become as important as the actors. "In all our movies," Tarr says, "the location has a face. It looks like an actor."

Their films had become bigger and slower: "We wanted to do more poetic things," Hranitzky says. "In the beginning," Tarr adds, "we were just talking about social conflicts, and then we were opening, opening, opening. Now we had to show the landscape and the time." Their first landscape film, made on the sly in 1987, was Damnation, written with Krasznahorkai: a noir-ish tale of betrayal in a crumbling mining town. "When we did location scouting," Tarr remembers, "we kept seeing the cable cars. It was awful weather, we were very poor and just trying to do something, but one thing was sure - the cable cars kept going. The most important part of these movies is mostly the location - you have to go and find the visual elements, something which is real."

In the intensity of its ritual-like pacing, Satantango is as close as cinema comes to nightmare. It concerns a rural community torn apart by a trickster messiah, but the narrative is less important than the tableaux that compose it - the opening parade of cows, the walk through a storm of detritus, a young girl's torture of her pet cat. That scene, Tarr insists, was done humanely under a vet's supervision, and the cat is healthy and living with him and Hranitzky outside Budapest. The drunk scenes, however, were as realistic as they look - shot, Tarr says, with the entire cast tanked up to the gills.

An easier starting point might be Werckmeister Harmonies, with a more surrealistic narrative - involving a circus, a giant whale and a sinister demagogue known as the Prince - that bears comparison with David Lynch's work. The Krasznahorkai novel it is based on, The Melancholy of Resistance, could be read as a parable about political opportunism as a system collapses: written in 1989, it seems remarkably prescient about the post-communist world as a whole. But it is harder to read a clear political meaning into Tarr's film. Hranitzky sees it as closest to The Wizard of Oz. For Tarr, the film was above all about its making, particularly the march through freezing conditions with hordes of extras. "We never thought about any political connection. The 600 unemployed men are real, in their real clothes, with the real ugliness, and this is the real poverty. Everything was real - it looks like a documentary."

Tarr may slowly have achieved maestro status on the festival circuit, but that does not make it any easier to get finance. "When we start a movie," he says, "we always start from zero." He and Hranitzky are now planning their next film, a Georges Simenon adaptation, and again the spirit of place is all-important. " It is set by the seaside, so we have to shoot outside Hungary." As usual, location scouting will be painstaking. So far, Tarr has not found a town ugly enough to shoot in.

 Satantango will be shown at the NFT, London SE1 (020-7928 3232), today, followed by Werckmeister Harmonies on Monday and Wednesday. Damnation is out next Friday.